When email first showed up in 1993, it was incredibly exciting! The notion that we could transmit our thoughts to one another in an instant and stay connected so effortlessly was nothing short of life changing! How is it that today email has become a blight eroding our productivity and causing misunderstandings; compromising foundations of trust with a single keystroke “send”.
We have ventured so very far from the romantic notion of late night heartfelt disclosures of Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly as they traded emails in the 1998 Romantic Comedy You’ve Got Mail. Their relationship deepening each time the familiar proclamation resounded, “you’ve got mail”. Screenwriter Nora Ephron had us believing that the gateway to our once broken hearts could be opened in the anonymity of this remarkable relationship catalyst. We were “all in” as the heroine of our tale Kathleen Kelly made her tearful declaration that “All this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings”.
In Arianna Huffington’s best selling book,Thrive, she cites a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute Study that found that the average knowledge economy employee spends 28 % of his/her day dealing with email- more than 11 hours per week. Email has become a very significant share of our daily communication.
As anyone in a business environment using email would attest, relationships are far from enhanced by this tool. In my conversations with my business clients, they often share stories of how email does a lot more harm than good when it comes to our professional relationships.
7 Ways Email Damages Our Professional Relationships:
The CC! Email invites premature escalation. It is very easy to include a higher level party in the Carbon Copy “cc” or worse yet, the blind copy “bc”. Whatever happened to resolving conflict directly and one-on-one?
The Masterpieces! Email allows us to pontificate as messages become well-crafted masterpieces of opinion; since there is no possibility of contrary points of view being expressed. Email is a one-way communication method and that never invites collaboration.
The Nerve! Most people feel much more comfortable saying things in email that they would never say in face-to-face communication. They can avoid taking responsibility for the reaction of others, because they don’t have to witness the response.
The Threads! The dreaded email thread. The email thread describes when someone decides along the way in an email conversation to copy someone new, who now has access to the entire “thread of conversation”. Messages easily and often find their way to new recipients without the author having any knowledge or intention.
The "CYA!" Putting something “in writing” makes it more official, formal and lasting. This breaks down trust and transparency in email communication. This formality makes us more guarded and less willing to show our honest vulnerabilities.
The Intrusion! There is an expectation of an instant response, which has us all "glued: to our devices. Sit in a coffee shop for a few minutes and observe the lack of human connection. We are all tethered to our smart phones, heads down, checking social media, texting one another and emailing. My children have even texted me from upstairs and I will admit, I have texted them back rather than walk up upstairs. Alas, we have lost something in our personal lives too.
The Abyss! The sheer volume of emails most of us receive makes it nearly impossible to consistently respond in a timely manner. Important issues are buried in a landslide of irrelevant issues and spam; everyone trying to get their issue noticed first.
American author Gretchen Rubin said “Technology is a good servant but a bad master.” There is no doubt that technology has enhanced our work lives and our lives generally. But the dangers of email communication can outweigh the benefits when it becomes an excuse to avoid the genuine and meaningful connection that can only be established in face to face interactions with one another.
Every now and then an email does turn up that can enhance our professional relationships, like the ones that say “cake in the conference room at 2:00. J
imagecredit: Thoughtcatalog.com
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